Page 107 of The Way Back Home

Those thoughts came at night mostly. In the quiet, in the dark, when there was nothing between me and the worst parts of my own head.

But even during those times. Even when I was in so much pain that breathing felt like a chore and staying alive seemed like an act of pointless stubbornness and I lay in the dark genuinely wondering if there was any reason at all to see morning.

Seyeon.

A hand reaching down to pull me up when I fell. A face appearing at the end of the street, walking toward me in the grey morning with his school bag over one shoulder, spotting me and breaking into that beam that lit him up from the inside. Standing on the corner of the crossroads where our streets met, waiting. Always waiting. Every single morning, without fail, no matter what. Rain or heat or freezing cold. Seyeon stood there and waited for me.

He didn’t look at me with pity. That mattered most, I think, more than the fights he jumped into or the nights he sat beside me or the food he brought or any of it. Seyeon looked at me the way he looked at everyone. With the same expectation, the same demand, the same stubborn insistence that I could do better and be better and that he wasn’t going to let me off the hook just because my life was shit.

He’d throw himself into a fight I started and come out of it swinging and bloodied and furious, then ten minutes later he’d crack me across the jaw for being an ass and not feel a shred of guilt about it. He followed every rule. Studied until his brain leaked out his ears. Teacher’s pet, model student, polite to every elder, never cut in line, always said please and thank you. And then he started smoking just to fix the rift between us, hacking up his lungs behind the school like a dying cat, eyes watering, face bright red, wheezing through every drag. He never once asked me why the rift was there. Never demanded an explanation. Just showed up at the back of the building with his hand out and said give me one, and choked his way through cigarette after cigarette just to spend more time beside me. His mother beat the backs of his legs raw with a broomstick for it and he still didn’t stop.

Seyeon was smarter than anyone I knew. Smarter than every teacher in that school, smarter than the kids at the fancy academies in Busan, smarter than anyone in this town had any business being. He’d study until his eyes bled and starve himself to death over his textbooks and come out the other side at the top of every class, every test, every competition, and he never once stopped trying. Never once looked at his empty fridge and his mother’s tired face and his dead father’s empty chair and said what’s the point. He just kept going. Kept pushing. Kept building something out of nothing with his bare hands, and he made me so ashamed of ever thinking about giving up. Because if Seyeon, who’d lost just as much as I had, who carried his own kind of grief and his own kind of hunger and his own kind of loneliness, could drag himself out of bed every morning and try, then what excuse did I have?

When things got hard I’d wallow. Sink into the black hole and let it swallow me. And then Seyeon would come along and sit himself down beside me whether I wanted him there or not and start talking. Prattling. Going on and on about ancient Korean folklore or the history of Buddhist temples or the migratory patterns of birds along the southern coast, pulling out his textbooks and showing me pictures of goblin masks, tracing the painted lines with his finger and launching into a thirty minute informational ramble about the role of folklore in traditional Korean culture. Voice animated. Eyes bright. Hands gesturing as he warmed to the subject, pointing at the page and saying see, this one’s Dokkaebi, the trickster spirit, there are over forty regional variations documented and each one represents a different element of the human condition, isn’t that incredible? Talking at me whether I wanted to hear it or not. And I’d sit there pretending to be bored, groaning, telling him to shut up, and listening to every word.

I survived every broken bone because Seyeon would be there the next day. Walked through every long painful night because the morning meant the crossroads and his face and another chance to run through the streets at his side. Took every hit and every scar and every sleepless howling hour in that house and buried them all in the hours I spent with him, let the sound of his voice write over the screaming in my head. And it was worth it. Every bruise. Every crack in my ribs. Every morning I woke up wondering why I was still breathing. It was worth it, all of it, for one more day beside him.

Ryowoon

34 Years Old

It’s too quiet.

That’s what wakes me, the absence of sound. Two days of rain hammering the roof, and now it’s just gone. The silence feels wrong, like the world outside hit mute.

I blink, frowning at the window. Clear sky. Pale blue washing through the glass, early morning light pooling on the floor. The storm broke sometime in the night while I was dead to the world.

Something shifts against my chest and I go still.

I look down. In the dim warmth beneath the covers Seyeon is pressed against me, his back flush to my front, every line of his body molded into mine. My arms are wrapped around him, one curled beneath the pillow under his head, the other draped across his waist with my palm spread flat against his lower belly. Our legs are tangled, skin against skin, and I can feel the knobs of his spine against my sternum, the shallow rise and fall of his breathing. My nose is buried in his hair. I don’t know when I pulled him this close. Sometime in sleep I must’ve just gathered him in.

I don’t move now either.

I press my face back into his hair and breathe. He smells warm, like sleep and soap. Clean skin, a sweetness I’ve never been able to place. My hand on his belly twitches, feeling the soft give of muscle beneath the surface, the trail of fine hair below his navel brushing my fingertips. I dip my head lower, press my nose to the curve where his neck meets his shoulder, just to feel his pulse tapping slowly and steadily beneath the skin.

My body just wants him closer, wants to press into the heat of him and stay there.

Which is, predictably, what happens. My cock stiffens between my legs, thickening where it’s nestled against the curve of his ass, tucked snugly between his cheeks. The warmth of him, the softness of his skin against mine, the way his body fits against me. I can feel every inch of contact and my blood responds, without restraint. Just want, pooling in my gut.

He stirs with a small shift, his hips adjusting, and I know he feels it because his breathing changes. Slightly quicker. I hold still, watching the side of his face as he turns his head on the pillow. His lashes flutter, soft brown eyes blinking open, unfocused and hazy with sleep. He finds me over his, blinking slowly, and then his lips curve. Recognition and warmth settling into his features as he feels the press of my body around his, my arms holding him, my face inches from his.

“Sorry,” I murmur against his shoulder. “Didn’t mean to wake you.”

He shakes his head lazily and reaches back. His fingers thread into my hair, sliding through the messy strands, curling at the back of my skull and pulling me forward. He kisses me. His lips warm and pliant from sleep. My stomach clenches, flips over itself, and I kiss him back because I can’t not, my arm tightening around his waist as his mouth moves slowly against mine. He tastes like morning. He tastes like mine.

He leans back, barely an inch, his lips still so close I can feel the shape of his words when he mumbles, “S’okay.”

His eyes are more awake now though. Clarity sharpening behind the sleepiness, the subtle shift from soft to calculating, and I should’ve known better because Seyeon has never been one to leave an opportunity on the table. His hand slides from my hair, trails down my arm, slips beneath the blanket between us. My breath catches as his fingers find my cock, hard and straining against his backside, and wrap around it with a loose, teasing grip.

His mouth curves again, wider. Eyes half lidded as he glances back at me.

“Now that I’m awake,” he says, the rasp of his voice going through me like a current, “maybe we should take care of this?”

His thumb drags across the tip and my hips jerk involuntarily, pressing into his grip, teeth clenching as heat floods south. I open my mouth to say something, probably something stupid, probably yes please god yes, when the rattle of metal sounds from the front of the store.

We both freeze.

Yuro barks from the hallway where he’s been sleeping, followed by the distinct clatter of the roll-up doors being pushed open and then a voice, female, familiar, carrying through the store.